


Grief

by Creator_Chaos



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-03
Updated: 2016-08-03
Packaged: 2018-07-29 01:45:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7665526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Creator_Chaos/pseuds/Creator_Chaos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Zexal Month day 2: favorite friendships.</p><p>An exploration of Kaito's reactions to Astral's death at the hands of 96.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grief

Kaito’s mind raced in circles he couldn’t follow as he stared at the water, gentle waves turned orange in the sunset. It was picturesque. Heartland was always beautiful—it was beautiful when beneath it his brother was being used to launch missiles into another dimension, and it was beautiful now when there was one less soul residing in it and there were at least two sobbing children to his left.

Yuuma had screamed himself out moments ago and collapsed knees and forehead onto the ground, still clutching at the empty space around his neck. Kotori cried in hiccups, face buried in her hands. Shark had kept it together until the third time Yuuma screamed Astral’s name; Kaito didn’t think he was crying, but his hands were shaking and his breath was a touch too audible.

Kaito finally pinned down a thought—no one else was coming. No one else knew that these children had witnessed the murder of their friend. There was just him, and he was going to have to do something.

He started with Shark, who jolted as Kaito dropped a hand on his shoulder and went awfully still. He didn’t know what to say, didn’t know if Shark knew Astral any better than he did, didn’t want to risk making this worse. What came out was simply, “We should go.”

Shark looked up at him, gave a glance toward Yuuma and looked back with a face that begged, _Please, I can’t, I can’t, don’t make me…_

He jerked his head at Kotori and Shark’s face melted into relief as Kaito walked over to Yuuma. He squatted down beside him, placing his hand gingerly on the hunch of his shoulders.

Kaito tried to think of how he comforted Haruto, but Yuuma was older, couldn’t be shielded the same way. He tried to think of himself at that age, but he’d already been half a parent by then, shoving any need for comfort into a relentless drive to nurture and protect Haruto, and he didn’t want that for Yuuma. Besides, he’d just lost who he wanted to protect.

He thought about what he would want if he lost Haruto, and his fingers curled involuntarily into a grip, making sure Yuuma couldn’t throw himself over the railing into the water.

“Yuuma,” he tried softly.

“No,” Yuuma choked out, and Kaito didn’t know if he was talking to him or the world, but he pressed on.

“Yuuma, you need to get up.” His shoulders shook harder, and Kaito slid his hand to his arm, pulling him upright into a kneeling position. His skin was icy and covered in a sheen of sweat; Kaito mechanically removed his jacket and placed it around his shoulders. Yuuma’s hands clutched at it desperately, arms still hugged across his chest.

Kaito turned to the others—Shark looked pained, and Kotori was still crying, but she was scrubbing at her cheeks and they were talking softly.

“Kaito-sama?”

He startled, jerking his hands back. He’d zoned out, crouched on the ground and still smoothing his coat over Yuuma’s shoulders. He glanced at the robot, and raised his voice for the others as he said, “It’s getting late. We’re going to go home.”

Shark stood and helped Kotori up as Kaito hefted Yuuma to his feet. He didn’t resist, but he was nearly the same size as Kaito, who had to brace himself to support him when he swayed on his feet.

Kotori was able to get them on the train that led to her house. The other passengers looked at them, Shark’s hands clenched in his lap, Kotori still wiping away tears, Yuuma essentially nonresponsive. He hoped they wouldn’t think he was kidnapping them. He couldn’t imagine what _he_ looked like in this moment.

They finally reached the stop and walked Kotori to her door. She grabbed Yuuma into a tight hug before she opened the door, then ran inside when she started sobbing again. Yuuma’s demeanor never changed.

Shark gestured to where Yuuma’s house was, a short walk back towards the school, then his eyes darted away in a hunted expression and dropped his voice so only Kaito could hear. “I don’t think I’m—I mean, it won’t do any good if I—I don’t want to…”

Kaito knew that he was also a child, also distraught and grieving in his own way, but he just couldn’t handle both of them in that moment. “Go.” He hoped Shark couldn’t hear the exhaustion in his voice.

If he did, it didn’t matter. He nodded and took off, soon disappearing into the darkening twilight. Kaito sighed, wrapped his arm around Yuuma’s shoulders, and walked.

Lights were on in the house as they approached, and for the first time Yuuma resisted the next step. Kaito looked over at him, and he shook his head. “I can’t…”

Kaito nodded and changed course towards the back of the house. “Orbital,” he said, hugging Yuuma close to him, “get us up to the roof.”

The window to the attic was easy enough to jiggle open. As he stepped down from the windowsill and guided Yuuma in, he was struck by the clutter, but prevented from moving further in immediately by the hammock hanging before the window. “Can you get to your bedroom from here?”

“I sleep here.”

Kaito didn’t question it further, just guided Yuuma into the hammock, because it didn’t seem like he would do anything of his own volition. The coat fell off him as he shifted, landing amongst the clutter; Kaito picked a blanket from the floor and tucked it around him.

“I can’t do this,” Yuuma whispered, barely audible as he buried his face in the blanket.

All that Kaito could say in reply was, “I know.”

He stayed there, silently leaning against the windowsill, until Yuuma’s soft cries turned into the even breath of sleep, and then he grabbed his coat and dropped down back outside.

He should tell Yuuma’s family something. They would ask. He could think of nothing to say.

He knocked on the door anyway.

A young woman answered. “Hello?” she asked, squinting at him in the dim lighting. “Hey, weren’t you in the World Duel Carnival?”

He nodded curtly. “I’m Yuuma’s—friend.” The word only stuck in his throat briefly. “Yuuma, he… he lost something very important to him.” It felt wrong to call Astral a thing, but saying ‘someone’ would only raise more questions. “Please don’t press him about it.”

“What—is he back?” She made a face of anger and confusion, turning back into the house. “Yuum—!”

Kaito grabbed the arm that still held the door open, and she cut herself off in surprise. “He just fell asleep. Don’t wake him.”

She looked at him like he’d grown two heads. “What the hell is going on?”

He shook his head mechanically. “I have to go.”

He turned back to the road, where Orbital was waiting in motorcycle form.

“Hey!” she called, but he was already gone.

After that, he let Orbital drive him back, unable to even keep his eyes on the road, let alone do the steering. He staggered up to his room and collapsed onto his bed, still-shod feet hanging off the side, coat slipping from his fingers as he stared at the ceiling.

He remembered the first time he’d seen Astral, inside the Emperor’s Key. He’d been trying to kill zim. Funny, how he’d never really apologized for that, never apologized to anyone for what he’d done to them, just accepted the way they’d all moved on and pretended not to remember. But he did remember, and now he remembered the fear in zir eyes then, and the fear in zir eyes in the moment the blackness consumed zim, and his stomach turned.  

There was nothing for him to do. Not even the hollow pursuit of vengeance—Astral had taken zir murderer with zim when ze went. They’d have to keep fighting the Barians, of course, but now, without the ship, even that was limited to whenever the Barians decided to show themselves on earth again. From a purely practical standpoint, stopping them seemed near impossible without Astral.

He didn’t notice the sunlight streaming through his window until he heard Haruto at his door.

“Niisan?” Kaito sat up quickly, taking in Haruto, still in pajamas, staring quizzically at him over a yawn. “Where were you yesterday? You said you’d be back for dinner.”

He tried to think back to the yesterday that happened before all this, but he couldn’t quite get his head around it. “Right. I’m sorry.”

Haruto walked up to stand by his bed. “Were you dealing with Numbers stuff with Yuuma and Astral?”

Kaito swallowed thickly. “Yeah.”

Haruto frowned. “You’re just lying in bed in your clothes. And your face looks weird. What’s wrong?”

Kaito forced a smile that he’d grown accustomed to giving when Haruto was sick. “Don’t worry about it. Why don’t you go get dressed and see what’s for breakfast?”

His frown turned into a scowl as he climbed onto the bed beside Kaito, standing on his knees to tug at Kaito’s cheeks. “Tell me what’s wrong!”

“Ack—Haruto—cut it out!” He wrestled Haruto’s hands away from him and found Haruto peering into his eyes.

“Something really bad happened, didn’t it?”

Kaito dropped his eyes and hands to his lap, feeling the energy go out of him as his shoulders slumped. How many people would he have to tell? How much of this would he have to do on his own? Astral had talked about how ze’d learned to rely on zir comrades, but comrades weren’t much help when they were dead.

“Tell me,” Haruto insisted again.

“Astral’s gone,” Kaito whispered.

There was a long silence, during which Haruto shifted to sit beside him on the bed, and Kaito draped his arm around him to let him snuggle into his side.

“I never told you about when Astral convinced me to eat.”

Kaito glanced down at his brother, trying to tie this statement to anything that preceded it. “What?”

“It was back when I left the tower, right before Chris found me and… and I was asleep for a while.” Another thing they didn’t talk about, now that it was done and Chris was trying to repair his relationship with them. How did their lives come to this, where every recollection was a minefield? “Yuuma found me and gave me dinner at his house. I didn’t really know what to do, so Astral showed me.” He was smiling. “I didn’t realize how funny it was then. Ze probably had never even eaten, but ze was miming what to do and telling me to get more.” His smile faded, and his hands wound their way into Kaito’s. “I just… thought I should tell you about that, if ze’s gone.”

Kaito’s eyes burned like they’d been open too long, no matter how hard he squeezed them shut. He wished Haruto hadn’t told him that, wished he didn’t have to think about how often Astral had reached out to all of them in zir own small ways, trying to make connections that must have felt even more foreign to zim than they did to Kaito but doing a damn better job of it anyway…

“What happened?”

That small question, in a smaller voice, nearly choked Kaito. “There was a Number that was free. Yuuma and Astral beat it, but it tried to take over Astral’s body. Ze managed to destroy it, but it must have wounded zim too badly. Ze was just… fading away.” He took a deep breath, eyes squeezed shut as if he could block the image from his mind. “Yuuma’s key fell off and disappeared with zim, and we were all back in Heartland, like nothing had happened.”

Another silence, and then Haruto sat upright and looked at him. “Are you sure ze’s really dead?”

Kaito winced. “Haruto, I know it’s awful, but I was there, I—”

“I know what you said. But _disappearing_ isn’t the same thing as _dying_. And it seems strange that ze would be able to send you back across dimensions if ze was almost dead. And why would Yuuma’s key fall off?”

“Well, it’s from the Astral World…”

“But Yuuma said he got it from his parents, way before Astral showed up. I don’t know why Astral would take it with zim unless ze was going to use it for something.”

Kaito’s body reacted before he did, heart suddenly racing. The key. Of course. It was a key, and it was from Astral World. And what were keys for except getting into places?

Suddenly he was up, throwing his coat on and racing out the door. He swung back around on the doorframe, skidding to a stop by the bed, grabbing Haruto’s shoulders and kissing him hard on the forehead. "Thank you. I have to go.”

“I’ll tell dad you’ll miss dinner again then?” he heard Haruto call as he raced down the hall.

“Orbital!” Kaito demanded as flung himself into a room with a large computer, one connected to the database that held all the information he’d gathered as a Numbers Hunter, including from when he’d examined the emperor’s key, when he’d entered it and first saw the fear of death in Astral’s eyes. “Gather all the data we have on the Astral World!”

“Y-yes, Kaito-sama!” Orbital replied, throwing himself into as much a frenzy as Kaito was.

He ran through what he would need, and the answer came quickly: help. He grabbed his d-gazer and made a call, waiting impatiently for the video to appear.

“Kaito?” the image of Chris asked in surprise. The background behind him changed as he closed a door and other voices faded.

“We’re going to build a portal to the Astral World.”

“Kaito, what in the world are you—”

“Astral’s dead.” Chris’s eyes widened, and he backtracked. “I mean, I thought ze was dead, but now I think ze’s in the Astral World, and we need to get zim back.”

Kaito filled Chris in while he combed through notes he’d scribbled, conjectures and theories about the other dimensions that he’d never bothered to compile. Anything might be useful at this point.

“What about Yuuma?” Chris asked.

Kaito froze and looked at him, and was struck by the odd sensation that Yuuma was in the room with them, until he realized that he was just picking up Yuuma’s smell from his coat. “He thinks Astral is dead.”

“Don’t tell him you think otherwise.”

Kaito grit his teeth. Chris was right—the only thing crueler than letting Yuuma believe Astral to be dead when ze was alive would be to let him hope ze lived when ze was indeed dead.

“He’ll need something.” The thought came out half-formed, but Chris nodded like he understood.

“I’ll send Michael and Thomas to Heartland. They can keep an eye on him.”

Kaito nodded. It felt off. Surely he knew Yuuma, had known—still knew?—Astral better than them, but he was useless here, useless at this, and it was important that…

“Orbital, let’s go! I have something to do.”

**Author's Note:**

> This turned out less friendship-y than I expected, but it was inspired by the prompt. Sorry about Shark, I tried to give him all the credit I could considering that he was never ever there at all while Yuuma grieved, but I can only do so much.   
> I intended this to be completely platonic; you can interpret it however you want, but please don’t tell me if you do. Kaito shipped with any of the middle schoolers squicks me out.


End file.
